Ultranormal Signal

Ultranormal signal is a fake signal that abuses the receiver’s pattern recognition ability by mimicking a pattern, exagerating it beyond real and causing a stronger response than anything real would.

There’s a concept I first saw (in Russian) in relation to Anime and birds, which I’ve ended up using a lot in other contexts. The concept is that you can abuse pattern recognition of receivers of all sorts by giving them patterns you want them to recognise without actually sending the signal they are trying to recognise from that pattern, and receivers would react to them more intensely than to a real entity.

This can be reified in art, in confidence tricks, in training immune system, and I’m sure in thousand other ways because it’s everywhere.

Pattern recognition

There is a chance you heard about pattern recognition mostly in context of neural networks, be it brains or artificial ones. Say you want it to recognise cats. You show it a number to cats, a number of non-cats, then show something and it would decide if this something is a cat or not.

Now, imagine you want to show that network something that is not a cat but would be perceived as a cat. For example, a photo of a cat. You could see videos where cats are shown images of other cats and they’d react to them like if they were real. Silly cats eh?

Now, imagine that we want something that wouldn’t be a cat but would be perceived as cat-ty as real cats can’t be. That would be what I know as ultranormal signal. I struggle to find a good example of that for cats because cat is many things, but if we want a cutest image of a cat perceived by a human, there is a good chance that a photo of a cat won’t be on top, an anime-style drawing will.

Key things:

  • ultranormal signal is a fake signal
  • that mimics certain patterns and exagerates them beyond anything possible in reality,
  • that leads to a stronger response from the receiver.

I see this concept everywhere.

Impressionism

Impressionism is the first major movement of what is usually in the modern art sections of museums. This is over 150 years old now so the concept probably won’t be novel for most people in 2025.

Before impressionism the goal of representational art was to draw things so they look as close to the reality as possible. This was a) perfected by then and b) largely unneeded because photo was invented. The impressionists instead tried to represent the world as they felt it, as they perceived it, as the impression they had of it. And turns out, being visually accurate wasn’t the necessary part of it. There is a lot of technical detail (like you should draw it fast before it’s gone), and a lot of finding your own style in it, but it’s also something that makes people feel the same rainy city a lot more effective than looking at a photo of a rainy city.

That said, impressionism is not the only genre like that, it’s just the first one.

Before we go to the nasty examples, look at this tweet and this website. The first one has so much in it: it’s a factory, and it’s huge and imperfect made of steel, and maybe unpleasant to be in. But it’s not alien, and there are people who built it, and people who go there, who see that bright future and are not afraid to use this disproportionally large tools to get to it.

The second one is a collection of visuals that gives you the impression of something that never existed, a parallel universe where design went a different way, and everything is angular and brutal, and gloom despite all the neon. Where old tech is next to new and next to something that never existed or possible. All that retrowave.

Alright.

Attention economy

Human attention is a scarce and a valuable resource. That fact perceived as an opportunity caused so much abuse.

You can find rants about it across the internet about that but two things that people don’t like the most is news and social networks.

News create and maintain a sense of being important by generating dozens of new articles daily. Things just don’t happen at that rate, or not to you, and most of those articles are reactions and followups and other fillers made to give you another notification. Another problem about news is that negative content catches attention better than the positive or informative one. This makes news literally an internet hate machine. That’s not the exhaustive list of problems with the news but that’s enough to categorise it as an ultranormal signal that wants to catch your attention.

No wonder people who find their ways to stop reading news are happy about it.

Another notorious attention hijacker is social networks. They abuse the same mechanism, perhaps even more successfully. Sometimes successful enough to call the victims terminally online and asking those who are not terminally online yet to go and touch grass.

Unfortunately, other apps can send you notifications too, unless you ban them from. And even if you disable notifications, applications are getting a habit to show you irrelevant stuff when you open them. No wonder though, that’s the time they have your attention.

Goodhart’s law

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure

This essentially says that people will try to produce ultranormal signals when they know the pattern. Go figure in your nearest measurable system what the measurement is and how the signals are produced. Goes from the amount of closed tasks to test coverage to preparing to exams by learning answers instead of principles to meeting whatever targets the companies have to literally everything.

The most extreme case I’ve seen recently is the man who killed google search.

Cargo cult

The term comes from something happened during WWII. People built airport-like structures and were doing rituals that looked roughly like parades hoping that it would cause cargo planes to arrive and bring food and other goods.

Wikipedia says it’s more complex than that and people built a whole religion around that, so let’s say I’m lying for clarity.

The term stuck because people love doing things to achieve something other people did without understanding why they did them in the first place and what is missing in the imitators worldview. Business and programming are notorious about that, but I’m sure I’m saying that because I’ve seen a thing or two in these two spheres and isn’t competent in other ones.

Here goes the stretch. We can describe about any complex system as somethings that has inputs and outputs and pretend the two are somewhat connected sometimes. Then cargo cult is a failed attempt to find this connection and produce an ultranormal signal. The signal is definitely fake, the intention to get a response is obvious, but the ultra- part is debatable.

Greenwashing

Greenwashing is an attempt to make people think that the company is or on the way to be environmentally friendly without intending to go this way with the methods described. There is a name for that but the practice persists so it so I’d think of it as a semi-successful attempt in generating an ultranormal signal.

This practice has particularly nasty tricks including plain lying, describing distant plans, doing thing that won’t help but will keep people busy, and shifting the blame to customers. Anyway.

What’s ultranormal about it is that the really environmental-friendly practices don’t usually get this much marketing effort, e.g. trams are much better than electric cars for the environment, yet go compare media presence of the two.

Vaccines

Vaccines are a way to show the immune system how a virus looks without infecting the organism, often causing a stronger and more focused immune response. Sounds ultranormal to me.

Conclusion

I wrote this post to explain a term and to link the post when people don’t understand it. The term is

Ultranormal signal is a fake signal that abuses the receiver’s pattern recognition ability by mimicking a pattern, exagerating it beyond real and causing a stronger response than anything real would.